Flying Lab Software has announced its Pirates of the Burning Sea’s MMO will have it’s free-to-play launch delayed by a week.

Speaking in a post over on the game’s official forums, producer Michelle Williams said: “The 22nd was the earliest possible release date due to legalities of giving notice to players.

“We’re expecting launch to be early the week after Thanksgiving. While some of us had visions of tons of new players spending their entire Thanksgiving weekend doing their Christmas shopping in Pirates of the Burning Sea’s Treasure Aisle, we’ve had to measure that against the risk of putting out a build with too many bugs on a short week when many folks crucial to responding to potential problems aren’t available to do so.”

Loads of goings on in the world of MMOs, as usual. Let us make sense of it for you.

This week’s had its fair share of content updates, a closed beta, character testing, teaser screens, and an MMO set near the Grand Canyon, in the future, after a plague. Honestly.

Read on after the jump.

Age of Conan won the Best Original Score award at the International Film Music Critics Association (IFMCA), beating out such luminaries as Afrika, Gears of War 2, Mercenaries 2 and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.

Lord of the Rings Online got two new developer diaries this week. One is all about the scary Old Forest, which is infested with spiders and murderous trees. The other explores lore behind Cerin Amroth — if you are unfamiliar with Middle Earth’s backdrop, be prepared for a sad tale.

Mabinog has a massive expansion in store for players on February 26, called Pioneers of Iria. The added content is four times the size of a normal continent in the game; players will be able to sign up as rival factions (elf and giant) and go PvP wild; new skillsets for player have been added as well as ones for monsters; an all new rebirth system is included; and tons more. Check out Massively for a really pretty trailer for the game and loads more info.

Reviews are starting to pour in for Darkfall, and it looks as though players are in for hardcore PvP action similar to Ultima Online. Like a more relaxed PvE game with optional PvP? This may not the game for you — judge for yourself.

Pirates of the Burning Sea will introduce the Skirmish feature when patch 1.14 goes live. Skirmish allows players the chance to learn PvP in a risk-free environment. Great way to learn the system without the consequences.

Free-to-play Turf Battles and FileFront are giving away keys to a closed beta of the game. Once in, you create a character and go straight into constant PvP. Join tribes, capture turfs — obviously — to farm for gems and other valuable items, then defend your spoils against other players wanting the same thing.

EVE’s first retail expansion, Apocrypha, has simplified the game for beginners by removing some of the character customization stuff. Newbies will be able to pick ancestry, bloodline, career, school and other specializations down the road. Should make it a little less daunting, perhaps. More through here.

Champions Online got three new pics over the week, and while we already posted a link to them — old ones were mixed in the bunch. We’ll help you out and send you over to the official website where all three pics of Lemuria are right up top.

Atlantica Online players should get patched next time they log in, but just in case you don’t, here’s a link. Extensive patch notes are on the main site, along with interesting information on the addition of an Alcatraz dungeon, two new player classes — the Musician and the Maniac — and Pocahontas. Yes, THE Pocahontas.

Cryptic’s dev blog’s confirmed that Star Trek Online will have collision detection, you’ll be able to set your warp factor in-ship, as well as answering endless other questions. The basic Q&A was between the devs and major Star Trek fans.

An interview with Lee Hammock, leader designer for upcoming sci-fi MMO Fallen Earth, is over on GameSource. The game takes place near the Grand Canyon in 2156 after a plague wipes out most of the human race. It has six factions, a classless advancement system and crafting features allowing players to make over 95 percent of in-game items. The MMO has FPS elements, and over 70 towns to explore in a real-time settings with a balanced mix of PvP and PvE.

Sure, the more important MMO stories gets their own pieces during the week, but what about all games that aren’t World of Warcraft? Where does that leave them? Here in our MMO news round-up, obviously.

So much happens on a daily basis in the world of MMOs that we thought we’d put as much as we can in one lovely Saturday post. Saves snowing you with the smaller stuff all week that way.

Full thing after the break.

This week Warhammer Online players have been immersed in the Night of Murder event that started on February 6, but if you’ve not logged into the game in a while you better hurry. Event ends tomorrow, so today is the last chance to get the Shadowbane Potion and the Murderous title that comes with it. A hot fix has also been applied to the game which addresses many different issues, one of which has monsters in the Empire starting area not fighting back.

Funcom announced an Age of Conan Advocate Program this week, to improve player feedback communication on classes and game systems. Currently, the company’s looking for volunteers who “communicate the specific class or game system concerns from the player base to the dev-team and who are active on the forums with discussing the ins and outs of their class or game system.” Sound interesting to you? Get involved.

The Pirates of the Burning Sea has a new dev diary posted, explaining an added Brawling system not present at launch. What’s a pirate game without a bit of brawling? A non-pirate game, that’s what.

Darkfall will be hitting Europe February 25, but only a limited number of pre-order and launch copies will be available so as not to destroy the game’s current infrastructure. Better to be late to the party than to have the servers crash when you log in, ya know? North Americans looking forward to this game will just have to continue to be patient.

Gamers involved in the suddenly popular Chronicles of Spellborn got a second patch this week, named Scroll of the Second Path. Thanks to the update, players will now find wandering unique bosses, called Menaces, in each region of the Shards. Wanted Posters now give quests to players to hunt down these humanoid and animal menaces. Defeating a boss is rewarded with tons of fame points. Patch notes can be found through the link.

Another update released this week for Cronous in the form of Episode 4, a continuation of the Ice Queen story. In Episode 3, all hell broke loose when the Ice Queen lost her son, Prince Berkiel. In this update, General Seo Kan, a loyal servant of Ice Queen, sets out to find the lost prince. The update offers new five-floor dungeon, a new zone, new sets of monsters and a boss quest. Players will have to clear the series of quests from Episode 3 in order to arrive at new zones Arcadia and Mon Laboness dungeon.

Still play Eudemons Online? Well, Happy Valentine’s Day to you: the offline event EuDate is available now. A platform has been set up for you to communicate with other players and share your love story with other couples. Single? You may just get a date while you are at it. The event started on February 12 and runs through February 28. There is also a new patch available here.

Seven year-old Anarchy Online saw a Legacy of Xan booster announced this week. According to an interview with game director Colin Cragg over on MMORPG, the content is for higher level players and “adds significant end game challenges to explore and defeat, both solo and in organized teams”. The update will have three different payment options which can be viewed in the interview.

Frogster is giving all loyal Runes of Magic players Diamonds. On every server, players that have at least one level 10 character will get a gem to spend on items available in the game’s Item Shop. To make this more attractive, Frogster lowered the prices of several top-selling items for the weekend, saving their players up to 66 percent per item. For the duration of this special offer, a permanent horse is available for 150 Diamonds instead of the usual 299 Diamonds.

KingsIsle Entertainment announced that over 1 million unique users have registered to play the 3D virtual world Wizard101, just five months after its launch in September 2008. The company is marking this milestone by rewarding the millionth registered player with a free one year subscription to the game, and a statue with an interactive commemorative plaque featuring the Wizard’s name has been placed in the Wizard City Commons. As a special “thank you,” all current and future players will receive 101 free Crowns automatically in their account. Crowns are used to purchase game areas and unique items. Several new items that cost less than 101 Crowns have been added to Wizard101 including a limited time commemorative Storm Beetle pet.

And finally, Lizard Interactive’s popular free-to-play MMORPG Sho Online will be giving away cyber-chocolates this Valentine’s. This special treat will raise all skills by 5 percent, attack will be increased by 50 points, Defense by 5,000 points, Health by 10 percent, and Fire Resistance by 300 points. The chocolate has a cool time of 5 minutes and it is dropped randomly in all over he game until February 19, 2009. So eat as much as you can.

SOE’s confirmed that seven of the 11 Pirates of the Burning Sea servers are being shut down. The MMO doesn’t have enough players to make the piratic magic happen across the full quota of launch servers, the company said in a statement on the game’s official site.

When Pirates of the Burning Sea launched on January 22nd, we introduced our customers to 11 new game servers. Through feedback from our players and evaluation of our server populations, it has become clear that key game features require populations of higher density in order to function at optimum levels. When you take into account both the disparity in player time zones and the delayed launch of our title in some countries, we were spreading our overall population too thin. Also, in more recent builds, we were able to improve our server technology to allow for an even larger population than we were originally equipped to handle.